There you are, a 25-year-old woman sitting at an outdoor table at the Hungarian Pastry Shop with a spiral-bound notebook, a Mona Simpson novel, and a cappuccino in a heavy white diner mug. Across the street, peacocks wander the grounds of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. You sit upright with your pen in hand, notebook open. You’re waiting for inspiration. You’re waiting for your life to start.

“I’m an editor, and I live in Manhattan.” This is a thing you get to say—to old high school classmates, to friends of friends, to a hypothetical attractive man who might strike up a conversation about the bizarreness of free-range peacocks in New York City. If that ever happens, which it never does.

Your life synopsis sounds good, but it implies something that isn’t true. It implies that you have a life in New York—that you are taking lunches with writers and attending literary parties or have any social life at all. But although you have lived in New York for two years, you still don’t feel like a part of New York. You’re still pressing your nose against the glass, trying to figure out how to traverse the invisible, immeasurable gulf to the other side.

Read more in Oldster Magazine.